I wear two hats: - I am making my living being a programmer - as a hobby I rock climb quite a lot (including ice climbing)

Story 1

When I started going into avalanche terrain, I quickly realized that I need to get some professional training before something happens. I went to a 2 day course. The lecture for 8 hours in a classroom, even though was done by a really good professional, was hard to understand. Especially when the lecturer introduced something called 'professional method of assesing avalanche risk'. Nobody understood. But at the evening, we went to the bar, ordered a few beers and the lecturer pulled out something called 'Snow Safety Cards' (https://www.snowsafety.nl/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Snow-Safety-Cards-Additional-Cards-v7.3-EN.pdf). And even though we were getting more drunk with each beer, we started to understand that method.

Story 2

I joined a new IT project. One of the veterans in our team convinced the founder that it would be great to integrate the team that just grew x3 and meet at a company 'Christmas Party'. We had an official dinner, and then we went to the pub. I pulled out these cards after one round (or two): https://punkx.org/unix-pipe-game/ext-0.1/. We started playing. To my surprise, none of the 15+ programmers knew what is a unix pipeline! Even the veteran. But people started learning it on the go. I don't have to tell you that I wasn't the one winning the game (probably because it is not balanced and it wasn't created with that in mind - mostly to teach kids). It was so interesting to see that it was the same story as with avalanche cards. People had no idea what the subject is, they learned easily on the go even with their frontal cortex numbed.

Even though these happened a few years back, I still keep thinking. What is the phenomenon of games that help you go into a pretty abstract/technical field, even when you are in the no-teaching mode? It kind of makes me think that the scientists that study dolphins say that they play 50% of the time, opposed to humans. I wonder if anyone tried to make a dolphin drunk and study how well they acquire knowledge whilst playing.